AN Edwardian family drama playing at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre depicts the adult offspring of a northern industrialist desperate to escape his influence.

The play, Rutherford & Son, looks at the rigid social order of the time and is named after a northern family glass works owned by John Rutherford.

Played by Barrie Rutter, this patriarch rips and roars around the stage, all taught muscles and clenched fists, growls and shouts.

He is a physical man, a fell runner in his younger years, and has been known to be violent, but it is not violence which keeps the younger Rutherfords under his influence. Beneath the hystrionics there is a shrewd mind and a sharp tongue.

"There are more ways than one of shirking life, and religion's one of them," he informs his younger son Richard (Andrew Grose) who has become curate - undermined at the glassworks by his father's steadfast lack of support.

The older son, John (Nicholas Shaw), has escaped to London only to return with a wife Mary (Catherine Kinsella) and an infant to support.

He has dreams of making his fortune with a patented new metal furnace but has neither the wherewithal nor the work ethic to succeed alone.

Rutherford Snr is painfully aware that the education he has paid for means the son will never be in the father's image.

The only man in the story to approach Rutherford's image is Martin (Richard Standing) - the right-hand man, cut from the same cloth. But could he be as ruthless?

That is the men dealt with, not the gentlemen - the play is laden with comment on the family's working class roots.

This being an early 20th century play the women are subservient. It was written by a woman, Gitta Sowerby, but when it was first performed was credited under her initials KG.

The three females in the house are Rutherford's sister Ann (Kate Anthony), his daughter Janet and Mary.

Ann unquestioningly accepts her place while Janet, now in her 30s and unmarried, has bottled up resentment towards the household which imprisons her. Mary has grown up as a poor Londoner and will do anything to provide a better life for the baby.

The production is performed at a high voltage with grand gestures and passionate arguments - none more so than in a brilliantly frenetic turn by Gilly Hopkins as the mother of a worker at the factory who has been accused of theft.

It is likely Sowerby felt the social order of Britain was changing but the play is less than clear. Two world wars were around the corner, leaving Europe ravaged, and after those change was to come. The play is a fascinating insight into family life ready for change.

Rutherford & Son runs until Saturday (May 18) at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford.